| Pasting together work from other sources
and then pretending it's your own, whether or not you acknowledge the sources
in a bibliography, is plagiarism. Buying a paper is fraud. Both violate
copyright; both are prohibited by the Student
Conduct Rules , and doing either can
get you suspended or expelled. Most important, both are dishonest; in both
cases you claim credit for work you haven't done.Either action is technically
possible, and certainly made easier with computers. With only a few keystrokes,
legitimate scholarly papers can be copied and pasted. And for the absolutely
completely lazy, dozens of internet companies stand by to peddle research
papers for outrageous prices. In many cases, the best that can be said
of them is that they have passed spellcheck.
Of course, cheating has always been considered a fine art by the dishonest. And some students have managed to slip bogus writing past their overworked professors. To those people, their education is not an accomplishment, but a commodity. They have nothing to be proud of. And now they have something to fear: recently, software tools that analyze style and continuity have been developed to help identify written passages that have been cut and pasted from different sources, and internet organizations that analyze student papers for plagiarism have formed. Some are so precise that they can identify copied passages by source and purchased paper by vendor. Independent instructors, departments, and entire institutions can take advantage of these services to spot dishonest writing. You can expect them to do so soon, if they aren't already. |
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